Out this week: The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder; Burning Down the House by Jane Mendelsohn; Stork Mountain by Miroslav Penkov; Shelter by Jung Yun; Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton; and The North Water by Ian McGuire. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
Tuesday New Release Day: Bachelder; Mendelsohn; Penkov; Yun; Dutton; McGuire
Marco Roth on Kazuo Ishiguro
In honor of the upcoming film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, n+1 posts Marco Roth’s compelling review of Ishiguro’s novel and Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island online for the first time.
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Pro-Life Was Progressive
Recommended Reading: This review, though it is really much more than that, of Daniel Williams' Defenders of the Unborn. Williams' book takes a detailed look at the history of anti-abortion activism before Roe v. Wade, but more generally it seeks to complicate our entire definition of activism in the context of the pro-life/pro-choice debate.
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Thomas Pynchon: The Comic Strip
Galley Cat highlights a 2003 comic strip, "Thomas Pynchon, Man of Mystery," that is unfortunately yet to go into syndication.
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Brillante
Is Alejandro Zambra the new great Latin American writer? James Wood thinks he is. In the latest New Yorker, he describes how Zambra’s new story collection alerted him to the writer’s oeuvre, going on to analyze all three of the writer’s novels in English. You could also read our 2011 interview with Zambra.
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I Feel Expository
If we are, as Adam Kirsch writes, in the midst of a golden age of essays, we might want to ask exactly which essays are proof of this golden age. His first three picks -- My Heart is an Idiot, I Was Told There’d Be Cake and Pulphead -- are unsurprising choices, but then it gets a bit more interesting when he looks at Sheila Heti’s latest novel. (You could also check out a few of our pieces on these books.)
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